What’s the internet (theoretically)?
Think about the things that you can’t do on your phone or laptop without an internet connection (i.e. on that flight from hell): loading websites, sending messages, watching movies, etc. What exactly is happening when you do this stuff, and how does the internet fit in?
One of the reasons that so few people understand what the internet actually is: we use the term to refer to a lot of different things. The internet is not the same thing as the World Wide Web, or the cloud. Those things use the internet to work.
Accessing the internet just means communicating with other computers out there in the world. Let’s go through these one by one:
- When you load a website, you’re downloading a series of HTML files from a server in the cloud (i.e. another computer)
- When you send an email, you’re sending data to another computer (usually through a server in the cloud)
- When you watch a movie on Netflix, you’re downloading data from a server in the cloud (or another computer if you’re using a Torrent)
It happens to be that most of the computers that you’re communicating with here are big servers in the cloud, but they’re still computers. The big reveal? That’s all the internet is: it’s the infrastructure that actually connects your computer and all of the other ones in the universe.
